Agile

Articles

Alexey Krasnoriadtsev has been managing globally distributed projects for more than ten years, applying agile methods to improve process efficiency, increase team productivity, and deliver quality products to market faster. With teams split across the globe, he shares with us his approach he's adopted to overcome the communication, process, and quality assurance obstacles facing team members who are a date line and time zone away.

In the agile world, there is a concept of “smells,” or symptoms that things aren’t going well. Introduced by Kent Beck and expanded on by practitioners, smells now describe problems involving adoption, coaching, design, code, and teams. When we see these symptoms, we can identify opportunities to improve.

In this article, Leanne Howard shares her top five tips for teams that are starting agile. Cultivate a culture and environment where people are comfortable. Offer support when team members need it, but allow them to self-organize to perform their tasks and believe they will do it well.

David Thach and Rick Rene share what they have learned are the most effective and readily adoptable agile processes, as well as a few techniques to integrate hybrid waterfall approaches. Companies adopt an agile software development framework to become more effective and more efficient, not to become a model of purist agile utopia—which, if attempted, ironically can be immensely costly and detrimental to progress, if not disastrous.

Anthony Akins explains how he used agile methods to modify the way he mowed his lawn. Learn how any project can benefit from using an agile approach and how large projects can be broken down into smaller chunks, each complete and with value.

Do you know when your work is done? Are you sure your feature is done? How about your release? Do you know when it’s done? Leyton Collins has some suggestions for you, your team, and your organization on how to know when things are really done.

While many teams can use help structuring their conversations, some teams also need some way to know whether the structured conversations that have taken place have provided sufficient information. Kent McDonald explains how using visualization boards can help in these situations.

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